Fife and Stokes

I joined Lagom a couple of months ago. I’ve probably not been in the role for long enough to know what normal feels like yet, but it’s been pretty good so far.

Two years ago, after leaving my job in the civil service, I was a bit concerned that years of working in government departments had left me institutionalised. I was worried that all that time I’d spent working out the rules and customs of institutions might have left me a decent operator within big organisations, but ill-equipped to operate outside them.

A year of freelancing sorted me out. I proved to myself that I could still function on my own, without the comfort blankets of the institution. It was liberating to just focus on the task in front of me, without all the office politics, committees and change programmes.

Now that I’ve got a job again (albeit with a very different type of organisation) I’ve been thinking about how to get the balance right between the focus I found as a freelancer, and the multifarious advantages of working with other people.

I’m grateful that the small team I’ve joined at Lagom have already spent plenty of time thinking about how to get this right as the business has grown.

Lagom is a Swedish word, which loosely translates as “balanced” or “just right”. It nicely describes the way we’re trying to work.

At the moment I’m spending much of my time working on my own, usually remotely, and I’m expected to make good decisions about how I do things and get on with it. But I am also able to draw on the expertise of other Lagomers when I need to, and I’m connected enough to feel part of a team. The balance feels about right to me, and I suspect that we’re working productively as a result.

Lagom are recruiting at the moment. We’ve got a job advertised for a user researcher. If you think you might be interested in working with us (and if you like the sound of the way we’re trying to work), please get in touch. Here’s the job spec:

In that time I’ve worked on projects for the Cabinet Office, Defra, the Genomics Education Programme, the Department for Transport, the Home Office, and the Ministry of Housing Communities and Local Government.

I’ve enjoyed the variety of the work. And I’ve worked with – and for – some great people. I’ve enjoyed managing my own time, choosing what work to take on and when, and how to balance that with life outside work. I’ve even quite enjoyed the minor peril of never quite knowing whether I’ll be able to find and sequence enough work to pay the bills each month.

I don’t have any regrets about the leap of faith I took to opt out of the security of the 9-5. But I’m about to change it all again because, starting this month, I’m joining Lagom Strategy.

Some of the most enjoyable and fulfilling pieces of work I’ve done over the last year have been with the team at Lagom, so I’m delighted to be joining Liam, Helen, Adam, Linda and the team on a more formal basis.

I hope that by joining Lagom I can help Liam and Helen to develop the business, providing a bit more capacity to expand the volume of work and the range of the offer it is possible to make to clients.

But I think they’ve already built a brilliant business, based around user research, discovery, and content strategy. I’ve already learned a lot from the rigour and creativity of their methods, which get great results, and always make Lagom projects a pleasure to work on.

For me, it provides me with a chance to get stuck into problems from start to finish, in a way that isn’t always possible as a freelancer on a day rate. It might just be a blend of all the best bits of the things I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. So I can’t wait to get started.

I’ve been doing some proper, paid, freelance government digital work for the last few months. A piece of work for the Cabinet Office, and another for a health ALB, so bits of government that I know quite well.

I must admit that when I started, after quite a long layoff, I didn’t know how I would feel about it. I wasn’t sure how easily it would all come back to me, whether I would recover the energy that I previously had for this stuff, or how I would feel being the supplier rather than the client.

But I’ve really enjoyed it, and I think I’ve done a decent job. It’s actually been a real pleasure to work alongside passionate and clever people, committed to doing good work, and I’m very grateful to Liam and Rupert in particular for that.

So as those projects come to an end, I find that I am a freelance digital person with spare capacity, and available for hire.

In my filter bubble at least, everyone seems to be talking about a lack of digital skills. It’s a problem: a lack of skills is holding back organisations, inhibiting the progress of the state, and posing a major risk to productivity in the UK.

And it’s not just talk. People are doing something about it. There are loads of initiatives to address the problem.

Some are involved in work to address the lack of specialist skills needed to lead and deliver digital services and products. Often this is about recruiting and training service designers, developers, user experience designers and the like. The work usually looks to California for inspiration in an effort to emulate the working practices of the most successful businesses of the last 20 years. It tends to be led by people with an evangeligal zeal for particular methods, and an associated lack of sympathy for alternative ways to get things done. The Government Digital Service Academy is an example of this type of capability building.

Some are involved in work to address the broader absence of digital skills amongst the users of digital services. This is a very different problem to attempt to address, with work often targeted at potentially excluded groups, including older, poorer or iller people. There are plenty of worthy initiatives in this category, like Digital Eagles or the Good Things Foundation. I’ve wondered in the past how much of my involvement in this type of work has been well intentioned but ultimately futile.

Some are involved in work to drive up skills for engagement, communications or marketing. For example by adapting skills for new or emerging media. This tends to be quite practical: how to create content for social channels, how to derive insight from new sources of data, how to participate appropriately online. Without these types of skills, it’s becoming difficult to imagine how a modern professional is able to retain a job. The Digital Action Plan includes some of this type of capability building.

All of this work to increase particular digital skills is necessary no doubt, and much of what I’ve described above it is providing excellent results.

But in my experience, there remains an underlying widespread and chronic lack of confidence around technology just about everywhere I look. Day to day I see this manifested as a lack of confidence people have when talking about technology: people change the subject, avoid terminology they’re unsure about, or defer to younger, hipper types when the conversation gets too techy.

I’ve often encountered it in people who haven’t acknowledged that technology has changed (and will keep on changing) the world around them, including the things that they are responsible for. They haven’t been able to fully adapt as everything around them has changed.

But I don’t think this is just a problem amongst the technophobic or the excluded. I’ve met plenty of people who work in roles that require a command of some technology, who display a similar incomprehension of technology in other areas: IT people with a blind spot for internet culture, communications professionals with no understanding of service design, designers with no interest in the back end.

And I’ve found it to be most frustrating when I’ve observed this lack of confidence in senior people who have ended up (because of their seniority rather than their expertise) responsible for big decisions about technology. It can be incredibly limiting when an absence of broad technology literacy and a lack of digital confidence amongst senior people means that they are unable or unwilling to have informed conversations about technology. This was at least part of the story of the initial failure of healthcare.gov.

Most people of working age today won’t have grown up with the internet, their school curriculum won’t have covered the internet revolution, and they won’t have retrained since. They may be avid users of social media, and they may have picked up specific bits of knowledge along the way, but they probably lack the broad understanding of technology that would give them the kind of digital confidence needed to operate without the fear of being found out.

But what kind of knowledge would people need to address this, and be confident in their technology literacy? If I was designing a curriculum to teach this stuff, it would probably cover the basics in:

the context for the internet, being able to answer questions like: what actually is the internet? what are the significant technologies and milestones in its development? what are the limits to these technologies? what have been the significant trends in the development of technology?

how digital services are changing how we get things done, covering things like: the new types of service of the internet era, the disruption to existing ways to get things done, the principles of human computer interaction and user centred design, the implications of raised expectations of service users, the big things that set apart the most successful businesses of internet era

the emergence and influence of internet culture, covering things like: the psychology of internet users, the wisdom of crowds, how participative media has changed how people collaborate, form communities and take action together

new and emergent technologies, covering the basics in things like: data and automated analysis, behavioural insight, artificial intelligence, and automation

She had shelves of cookery books too, but these are the ones I remember her actually using.

Inside there are pages and pages of recipes, splattered with margarine and sugar. Some are hand written, some are cut from magazines. They describe the food of my childhood, and every family occasion since: Betty’s pudding, battenburg, ginger squares.

The contents page is adjusted to reflect the types of recipe included. Additional space is given to “cakes and biscuits”, “Chinese and vegetarian” and “more cakes”.